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Congressional Daily Record
This section captures a floor statement or debate entry. It mentions legislation such as Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to "Air Plan Disapproval; Colorado; Regional Haze Plan for the Second Implementation Period"., members such as Sheldon Whitehouse.
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April 29, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am speaking in advance of my colleague from Colorado Senator Bennet's effort to seek redress in this body for a wave of pollution that is being unleashed in his State and neighboring States as well.
right now is that one State can't regulate pollution that comes to it from another State. And yet the good neighbor policy that somebody has to be able to say “Hey, wait a minute; you can't pollute my State from another State” is one that EPA has just walked away from.
In this case, the problem is a coal facility in Colorado. And just start with coal. It is really indisputable that coal is America's dirtiest, deadliest, and most expensive energy source. It is a dying industry for market reasons. It can't compete because it is dirty, deadly, and expensive.
to keep coal on life support, perhaps because the coal industry paid $3.5 million in 2024 to help him get elected, and Trump is a man who understands a quid pro quo.
the coal industry; never mind our health. Remember, it is the deadliest of energy sources. And never mind our bank accounts. Remember, it is the most expensive of energy sources.
pollution standards. Who loses? Anybody exposed to the toxic pollution they emit. Who wins? Trump's big donors.
Federal Power Act to force coal plants to stay online, driving up consumer costs against the wishes of the utilities and even the plants' owners. But they still had to buy and burn coal. So there is somebody out there who is going to make money off that.
Coal plants are the Nation's most significant source of haze. The same coal pollutants that drive health issues and deaths nationwide drive haze formations. Under the Clean Air Act's Regional Haze Program, States establish plans to reduce haze-causing pollution. States may choose to include coal plant retirements in their plans. Often, that is consistent with the utility and the plant owner's wishes, as an old plant ends its useful life. When the EPA approves these plans, the retirements then become enforceable.
included coal plant retirements that Colorado utilities had independently and voluntarily planned for. “They do better with cheaper, cleaner renewable energy” is the simple answer.
Colorado's plan, making the argument that Colorado's plan, voluntarily entered into with these utilities, could represent a “taking” under the Constitution.
So we have here a really flagrant abuse of Federal authority: Make it more difficult for Colorado to protect its own citizens from toxic pollution and to provide affordable energy. And the resulting pollution won't just endanger Coloradans. This is a national issue because the haze blows, with prevailing winds, toward eastern States.
bad air days. And if you are driving into work in the morning and you are listening to the talk radio, they will say: Today is a bad air day. Children should stay home. Elderly people and people with breathing difficulties should not go out.
It looks like a beautiful summer day. Kids will want to be in the yard, but it
is a bad air day. And so that health warning gets issued by the State of Rhode Island.
And there is nothing the State of Rhode Island can do about it. If every car in our State was an EV, if everything ran off of clean electricity, we would still be out of compliance because we are a downwind State.
enough that prevailing winds carries it out of their State and onto ours, they are the ones that are to blame, and there is nothing we can do about it.
important job when neighboring States are polluting one another and can't reach a regulatory solution because it is out of State, and that is exactly the predicament that we are creating here today.
Congress the opportunity to vote on regulations, well, that is why we are here today. We have a chance to undo this, and I hope we will because everybody here has a good chance of being a downwind State. Even California is often a downwind State from China. So you have got to be able to have protections from upwind pollution, and this would strip that.
tear down protections of Americans' health, safety, and environment we have a chance to claw back. Congressional Review Act resolutions like this one can help hold the administration to account.
Administrator Zeldin. The point that I made in that hearing was that we are now headed into an election cycle in which the American people are desperately concerned about the cost of stuff. Stuff costs too much, and the Trump administration is ignoring the problem, if not making it worse. Those are basically the two buckets. They are either ignoring it completely or they are deliberately making it worse.
deliberately making it worse. They are raising costs for consumers on purpose.
How are they doing it, and why are they doing it? Well, the “how” is that they are keeping inexpensive clean energy off the grid. We just went through this in Rhode Island. Our Revolution Wind offshore power facility was stalled by illegal orders of the Trump administration not once but twice, and the result was that power was delayed from coming ashore. Well, Revolution Wind has a contract to sell power onto the grid. That contract specifies a price. The price is 9 cents—9 cents. ISO New England—our grid operator—can do fairly easy math to show what the average grid price is for electricity. And guess what. It is 18 cents. So this 9-cent power was stalled going into an 18-cent grid.
Because it is 9-cent power, what would it have done? It would have been called up first by the grid because every grid calls up the least expensive power first. So that 9-cent power would have been flowing into the grid. It would have been filling up demand, and that would have meant that some dirty fossil fuel-polluting units would not have been called up. They were too expensive to run.
for the dirty, polluting fossil fuel plants—that is money directly to the fossil fuel industry—two things happen: One, costs go up for all consumers because those new, more expensive plants called online raise the price for everybody. So electricity bills go up. They are driven up on purpose by the delay of clean energy getting onto the grid.
from American consumers go? Guess where—to the owners of those fossil fuel plants that are in the margin, the ones that get run because the clean energy has been kept off of the grid.
ratepayers and into the pockets of the fossil fuel billionaires who put so much money into getting Trump elected. That is being done on purpose. Electricity costs are being driven up on purpose.
Protection Agency or the Department of the Interior, for that matter, don't understand how the grid works. They have people who know exactly how the generation stack works. They know exactly that the least expensive units get run first and that the least expensive units displace the more expensive units, which is good for consumers, until the heavy hand of a fossil fuel-influenced government steps in and tries to prevent consumers from getting low-cost clean energy. Then the hole that that leaves that would have been filled by clean energy—you have got to go fill that hole by going up the stack to more and more expensive units, and virtually every time, that more expensive unit is a fossil fuel unit.
is a ginormous money pump to extract billions of dollars from regular consumers who would otherwise be enjoying the benefit of low-cost clean power, and they have done it as a reward for Trump's big fossil fuel donors, the ones who threw hundreds of millions of dollars at his campaign and who are now reaping a multiple-times reward with that investment.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Schmitt). The Senator from Colorado.